Bookmarks: Alabama Stitch Book

by admin on June 22, 2009 in Bookmarks, DIY

My sis­ter turned me on to Alabama Chanin. Steeped in Deep South mythol­ogy, the com­pany makes pretty, hand-​​sewn, quilted and beaded cloth­ing and home acces­sories, pri­mar­ily made with recy­cled cot­ton jer­sey. There’s some­thing roman­tic and rus­tic about the designs, which often fea­ture frayed edges and vis­i­ble knots.

Alabama Stitch Book by Natalie Chanin

When I got my hands on a copy of Alabama Stitch Book by com­pany founder and designer Natalie Chanin, I recruited my sis­ter to test out one of the DIY projects in the book. We chose a tea towel to keep things sim­ple and because I thought a pretty tea towel would make dry­ing duty dur­ing cot­tage kitchen cleanup a lit­tle more pleasant.

These are the tea towels as shown in the book.

These are the tea tow­els as shown in the book.

Alabama Stitch tea towel project

And this is the tea towel my sis­ter made.

Many of the projects in the book can be made using old cot­ton T-​​shirts, and involve lay­er­ing two colours and cut­ting out a pat­tern to reveal the sec­ond fab­ric underneath.

My sis­ter felt the tech­nique was a lit­tle finicky for a begin­ner like her, but that  sew­ers with a more expe­ri­ence won’t have any prob­lems with some of the fine work. She would mod­ify this project by adding a back­ing layer to hide the strip of fab­ric that fills in the cutout pat­tern, to make the tea towel double-​​sided. And that’s the fun of DIY, isn’t it? You always find a way to make each project your own.

PS– Appar­ently the bis­cuit recipe in the book is quite good, although of course my sis­ter didn’t see fit to share any of her test bak­ing with me.

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